Jukka Aaltonen's List: Philosophy

• According to the classical theory, a lexical concept C has definitional structure in that it is composed of simpler concepts that express necessary and sufficient conditions for falling under C.
• classical or definitional structure. Much of its appeal comes from the way it offers unified treatments of concept acquisition, categorization, and reference determination. In each case, the crucial work is being done by the very same components. Concept acquisition can be understood as a process in which new complex concepts are created by assembling their definitional constituents. Categorization can be understood as a psychological process in which a complex concept is matched to a target item by checking to see if each and every one of its definitional constituents applies to the target. And reference determination, we've already seen, is a matter of whether the definitional constituents do apply to the target.
• t

  he prototype theory. According to this theory, a lexical concept C doesn't have definitional structure but has probabilistic structure in that something falls under C just in case it satisfies a sufficient number of properties encoded by C's constituents
• theory theory of concepts. This is the view that concepts stand in relation to one another in the same way as the terms of a scientific theory and that categorization is a process that strongly resembles scientific theorizing
• conceptual atomism, the view that lexical concepts have no semantic structure (Fodor 1998, Millikan 2000). According to conceptual atomism,

  the content of a concept isn't determined by its relation to other concepts but by its relation to the world.
• responding to the plurality of conceptual structures is t

  o suppose that concepts have multiple types of structure. This is the central idea behind conceptual pluralism. According to one version of conceptual pluralism, suggested by Laurence & Margolis (1999),

  a given concept will have a variety of different types of structure associated with it as components of the concept in question.
• concept eliminativism—the view that there are no concepts
• an analysis embodies a definition; it specifies a set of conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the application of the concept.

6 more annotations...